Economic policy

The Only Thing New is That They’re Getting Away with It

/ ontheoutside / 2 Comments

I need to return to Adam Smith’s quote from last time.  It’s so accurate it’s incredible.  First the quote:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants and manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 3)

All by itself this stands as rebuttal to the Republican Party’s standard argument: “We’re businessmen, so we’re good for the economy.” It seems businessmen are not so benevolent. Let’s look at the record—Adam Smith could hardly have been more to the point.

I’ll start with Obama’s first term.  George W. Bush left a mess so bad that it is only partially acknowledged.  The stock market crashed and the economy was shutting down (basically from what amounted to misguided deregulation of the overall banking system through mortgage-backed securities).  But that wasn’t the whole story.  Hidden behind the smokescreen of “neoliberalism” was the fact that essentially all of the job loss to China occurred either during Bush’s administration or with their crash. Just look:

That’s no accident. The Bush people refused to resist China’s WTO-prohibited trade practices (e.g. currency manipulation), because they were actively promoting off-shoring—since that’s what business wanted (e.g. about 70-80% of Walmart suppliers were in China).  In this case it’s tempting to say “deceived and oppressed” was coupled with pure incompetence, but that actually misrepresents a situation that Adam Smith understood perfectly.  Both the deregulation and the off-shoring were cases of business getting what it wanted without the necessary “suspicious attention”.

Obama’s job was to get us out of that mess, and he was well-underway when Republican decided that he might succeed.  That could not be allowed, since there was an election coming up.  So with the fabricated excuse of the “balanced budget amendment” rhetoric they essentially shut down government including all stimulus to the economy.  That meant jobs and income for many people.  They also blocked any aid to the millions of people who lost jobs from Bush’s off-shoring.  “Deceived and oppressed” is right on.

Now we get to Trump.  The “balanced budget amendment” rhetoric disappears instantly, and was replaced by a tax cut funded by a 2 trillion dollar deficit.  That was going to cure the last part of the recovery they had sabotaged.  However the economy was actually in pretty good shape, and as we noted last time the only stimulus that Obama ever got past the Republicans (in his first term) was on the order of $500 billion.  This needs to be emphasized.  We read articles about governments in Africa where department heads steal millions by handling their budgets as personal slush funds.  We in the US don’t do things like that.  We’re much more civilized.  Using the “balanced budget” ploy the Republican Party took 1.5 trillion dollars of benefits for its owners quite legally from the American people. If you want stumulus you’ve got to pay us first. “Deceived” is the very least you could say.

That money went straight to Wall Street.  It inflated corporate profits, so stocks went up.  But the companies didn’t spend that money on employees or the business, they used it for stock buybacks—a second kick in the pants for the market.  For the people in Adam Smith’s quote all you can say is—what a wonderful world this is!   

And they’re ready to do it again.  They’ve made up the fiction that inflation is all due to spending money for the benefit of the population.  Can’t do that.  Bad idea. Have to give it to us, and it will be Nirvana.

The next deficit is estimated at $4T.  Republicans have signed-on salivating—Will wonders never cease? (And that’s before the sweetheart deals with individual billionaires!) But that’s not the end of it. Trump’s new set of proposals (tariffs, deportations, tax cuts) is wildy inflationary, potential as damaging as what trashed the economy under George W. Bush—again what you get without “suspicious attention”. (It may be a side issue, but we even have a potential repeat of Bush’s banking debacle with all the cryptocurrency money behind Trump.) All of us have to hope it doesn’t happen.

Adam Smith did his job.  Can’t say we weren’t warned.

A Real Comparison of Economic Policies

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Since both Biden and Trump have records as President, the press is full of articles like this one attempting to compare their economic policies and evaluate the results.  Now that Harris has replaced Biden and announced a few measures, she’s in the game too.  Unfortunately most such articles completely miss the mark.

The reason is that you cannot judge anyone’s economic policy except in the context of the problems he or she faced.  And you cannot make any judgment of how good he or she would be as President now without assessing the problems we face today and comparing our needs against the candidates’ demonstrated approaches.

That may sound obvious, but I haven’t seen a single article that tried hard enough to be serious.  Let’s start with Trump.  Obama left the country in pretty good shape, but one has to understand that his whole Presidency was spent trying to recover from the 2008 crash.  In that he had done pretty well (compared to other western countries), but he had one serious problem:  particularly in his second term the Republican Party decided to sabotage the recovery.  Looking ahead to the 2016 election they essentially shut down government—promoting a “balanced budget amendment” as a reason to block all stimulus spending.  That left some work to be done with unemployment, for example. So that’s what Trump inherited—a good economy that had been throttled short of complete recovery.

As soon as Trump took office the “balanced budget amendment” discussion vanished, and Trump stimulated the economy with a 2 trillion dollar budget deficit.  That completed Obama’s recovery at enormous cost to the country. For comparison, the largest stimulus Obama was able to get through Congress (in his first term) was about $500 M.  The vast part of Trump’s $2 T did not go into jobs or corporate investment; it went into stock buybacks.  Trump bought maybe $500 M of progress with a $1.5T contribution to inequality in the US.  Further, despite all the talk of reviving manufacturing, US manufacturing (as a sector) was in recession before Covid hit.  Once Covid happened, Trump simply retreated from running the country.

Biden inherited a mess.  First we had to recover from Covid, so there was much time and effort spent on getting the vaccine to everyone.  In this the biggest single problem was sabotage by misinformation from Republicans in general and Trump in particular.  During Covid there was a series of bipartisan deficit-funded bills to keep the country running with progressively less Republican support.  Once recovery started, however, there were some big surprises.  In key areas supply and demand were badly mismatched—there was a massive shortfall in computer chips needed for cars and other big-ticket products, new patterns of demand appeared for housing reflecting living arrangements during the pandemic, and the shipping industry took many months to be fully back in business—causing shortages of all kinds of imported products.  There were also shorter-term spot shortages, which led to longer-term price increases from major suppliers happy to take the chance.

Biden’s last (Democrat-only) stimulus has been blamed for all inflation that followed Covid.  Many articles have been written about his terrible mistake—the money delivered to US families didn’t even cover the inflation of the following year!  That conclusion ranks with the “balanced budget amendment” for self-serving dishonesty.  Given the magnitude of those other inflationary pressures, there is no question that the stimulus payments covered considerably more than any inflationary effects of the stimulus itself (and inflation in the US was lower than anywhere else in the Western world—stimulus or not).  Biden was correct in deciding that there was a fair chance that the post-Covid recovery would not be painless, and that stimulus money was needed to help people. In so doing he violated the mantra that the Republican Party is most desperate to defend: “you can’t spend money to help people”.  Help only comes top-down, from money spent on us.  The best commentary on this subject comes from Adam Smith himself:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants and manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 3)

Before we leave this subject of inflation there is one more question that needs to be answered:  why, despite the huge budget deficit, was there no inflation under Trump?  The main part of the answer has already been noted—the country was not yet completely out of the 2008 crash.   There was no wage pressure, and people were not ready to spend.  Furthermore we had actual downward pressure on prices from those evil Chinese—all that cheap stuff in Walmart was keeping prices low.  By Trump’s third year there were signs of a rise in wages, but then Covid hit and that was the end of that.  As far as inflation was concerned, Trump was “saved by the bell”.  As we noted at the beginning, you cannot say anything sensible about a President’s economic policy without putting it in the context of the time.  Trump did not prove that he knew how to run up a huge deficit without inflation any more than he proved he could fight Covid with bleach.

Biden got the country going again and finally started rebuilding the country’s decaying infrastructure and  undertaking changes that will be required (whether we like it or not) for climate change.  He recognized the importance of education, although he was blocked from doing as much as is needed to provide opportunities for all (and the costs of his programs were hugely exaggerated).  Manufacturing is now in vastly better shape than under Trump.  He has also started with the task of finally doing something about decades of consolidations and monopolies during our period of non-enforcement of anti-trust laws.  It needs to be emphasized that anti-trust activities are NOT examples of overreach of government against the free market.  Even Adam Smith (again) emphasized the need to combat monopolies, and not just because they make things more expensive—they block innovative new businesses, make the country less competitive, and even weaken a nation’s military strength.

At this point it’s time to stop describing the historical context and consider where to go from here.  The first conclusion is probably the most important:  there is nothing in Trump’s historical performance that shows competence in managing the economy.  He gave himself (and his ilk) a big tax cut, that helped an artificially-stunted recovery (at very high cost), and avoided inflation only because of the incomplete recovery and because Covid bailed him out. That history is no recommendation.  We cannot let ourselves be tricked by the blindness of all of those economic analyses without context:  “Trump’s tax cuts led to full employment last time, so maybe they’ll be good this time too.”  ARGH!!

So the question of Trump’s economic competence comes down to his economic plans.  While Trump has been vague about many things, there are three items about which he has been absolutely clear:

  • A complete tariff wall around the US protecting all US industry, 10% overall and 60% on imports from China.
  • Deporting all undocumented immigrants, amounting to at least 11 million people
  • A huge tax cut modeled on his last one, currently estimated to cost $4 T.

The attitude of economists on this subject was summarized in a recent NY Times article:  not just bad but catastrophic.  We have to get used to that idea.  The fact that Trump got through his first term is not proof that he knows what he’s doing.  The plan can really be completely crazy.  Remember Trump’s six bankruptcies. Also, we have to get used to the idea that economic stability is not guaranteed.  The Brits voted for Brexit, and their standard of living took an immediate hit from which it may never recover.  This plan is actually worse.

We’ll go briefly through the items one-by-one

The Tariff Wall

Tariffs (including Trump’s tariffs from last time) are effectively a tax paid by the buyer in higher prices.  A universal tariff like this one is therefore massively inflationary and not just for imported goods.  Historically (and in Trump’s last term) domestic producers also have taken the chance to raise prices. Universal tariffs also invite retaliation and diminished US clout worldwide.  Given the level of consolidation in the US economy, the tariffs will significantly reduce competition and dynamism of business domestically, as many markets will be monopoly or cartel controlled.  And by isolating the US from developments elsewhere, it guarantees that the US will be left behind for any developments that don’t originate here, making us a second-class power.

Deporting 11 million people

These people are working today.  We’re eliminating the lowest tier of the workforce, with no obvious new population to take over.   Both the loss and the disruption are massively inflationary.  Many of those jobs may never be filled.  The Brexit people found that they had to import a whole new bunch of foreigners to replace the ones they were so happy to get rid of.

The $4T tax cut

The huge deficit is again massively inflationary.  The only reason that didn’t happen last time is that the economy was still short of recovery—which is not the case now.  Further the huge deficit would be on top of all other spending issues we will have to face, including for climate change and defense.  Businesses didn’t need it last time–they spent it on stock buybacks, not on investment in the business or on the employees. Last time’s claim that it would pay for itself proved completely untrue.

We are talking about a real hit to everyone’s well-being with no short-term path to recovery.  And that’s before even thinking about the threats to democracy.

Finally we need to end this with a look  at the other side.  If that’s what we’re getting from Trump what would we be getting from Harris?  After all we’re told she’s a wild-eyed radical.  Her running mate was so far left that he spent government money giving meals to school kids!

There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about anything close to a 4 trillion dollar deficit.   There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about engineering of people’s lives the way Vance is so eager to do.  Isn’t freedom from that sort of thing what made us different from the hated communists?

What is different is positive.   There is a role for government in making people’s lives better.  That means education, jobs, a future.  Harris’s initial proposal talks about aid for families with children and combating the kind of post-Covid price-fixing mentioned earlier. There is also a role for government in helping the private sector with things it doesn’t do well—like anti-trust, like educating the population for the jobs that need to be filled, like preventing business from croaking on climate change because doing something reduces immediate profits.  No one is talking about hurting business competitiveness, but it is the task of government to act in the interest of everyone.

This is an election where the country needs to reject what is radical egomania and return to what are in fact our long-time values.

Message for Evangelical Voters

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Everyone seems to have written off the evangelicals as a lost cause. We hear from many directions that they regard Trump as chosen by God to lead the country from infamy to some kind of evangelical paradise. That’s despite a personal history that is anything but Godly.

However personal history is not the issue. The message to the evangelicals has got to be something much more to the point. Despite the rhetoric, the fact is Trump is NOT THEIR GUY. He’s a con man doing what he’s has always done: make money off people who have the misfortune to trust him. He and his hacks are the ones saying he’s chosen by God. He has grabbed hold of an issue that means nothing to him, so that he can pick their pockets and run the country for himself and his ilk.

He has delivered on abortion. No money in that. What is money is tax breaks to big business donors and Trump himself. He did that last time, and he has said he is going to do it again. Already last time the massive tax cuts in good times went mostly to Wall Street and left the country with a record increase in debt. Further custs would be felt in medical care costs, education costs, the environment, and Social Security. There won’t be any “winning for his people”.

He has also said that he is opposed to democracy and is going to rule accordingly. That does NOT mean he is going to run the country for you. It means that he is going to run the country for HIM, and there won’t be a single thing you can do about it. This will not be the idealized American past of peace, friendship, and family values. It will be an unChristian paradise where anything goes for the rich and powerful, with nothing for the well-being of anyone else. Unafordable healthcare, no labor or environmental protections, no future for anyone’s children outside the rich. In all his bankruptcies Trump sucked out money and screwed the contractors and vendors who trusted him.

Biden is not threatening your practice of religion or anything else about how you live. And he regards himself as President responsible for the whole country, including you. You may find that much of what he has proposed is relevant to you. There is also no threat to your continued voice in the running of the country.

Trump is NOT the unGodly warrior for Christ. God is only his foot in the door. After that there’s the lesson repeated over and over in history: enemies of democracy are no one’s friend.

Right-Wing Fantasyland meets Chinese EVs

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There was a good article in Bloomberg today describing the many aspects of Chinese dominance in EV’s.  It’s useful if discouraging reading.  How did this happen?  Why is the West so far behind?

Obviously there are multiple items and reasons behind them.  However all of them trace back to a single big one:  the endlessly propagandized right-wing fantasy of the miraculous, all-knowing, perfectly-adaptive private sector.

In this case there were two principal failings of the private sector:

  • Denying climate change, because it was inconvenient for current operations.
  • Discounting any role for government, because the private sector by definition knew better

With these two failings the private sector was blindsided by a market transition they had gleefully dismissed as nonsense—because it didn’t fit with current mindset and current operations of business.  The Chinese did strategic planning, and the private sector in this country congratulated itself on its ability to squelch it.  The oil companies are still at it.  Trump will do it again if he gets a chance. We lost four years of opportunities to position for change–an eternity for competition.

That is not a surprise.  There are things the private sector does well—principally optimizing current operations.  However the current economic powers-that-be are very poor at major transitions.   Instead they will act, as in this case, to hang on to the optimized past and to delay that future for as long as possible.   In other words to defend their their own immediate private interests against the interest of the country as a whole. 

Government of course has no perfect crystal ball, but it doesn’t have the same limitations and the same vested interests. It can act to support future businesses even before their time has come.  We have had some of that.  Both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of Obama-era seed money. (Some readers may remember Romney’s ridiculing Obama for such initiatives!) The mRNA vaccines that stopped Covid were only possible because of decades of government-funded research.  All of that in the face virulent right-wing opposition.  The Chinese government locked up resources and initiated new businesses.  We were too smart for that!

The bottom line here is explicit.   The private sector is not a miracle machine.  Its interests are not the same as our national interests, and it can’t even do a good job of providing for its own success.  We need government to care about the well-being of our people and even about the well-being of its businesses. 

As a final point here it’s worth noting that–contrary to the usual sloganeering–when Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, he was not arguing for government to stay out of the miraculous private sector.  Instead he was making the case for a competitive “free” market, something only possible if government would stop the private sector from perverting the economy with monopolies and government influence.   That’s still a battle today!

We Can’t Afford That

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Heather McGhee begins her book The Sum of Us with the question “Why can’t we have nice things?”.  And she makes clear what she means: “basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics”.

She then goes on to explore how racism has been systematically used by the wealthy and powerful to keep that from happening—which is to say how they keep that money and power for themselves.  I’m happy to promote her book, however I also want to spend a little time here on her question—on the mindset that says we can’t.

My example is Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.  I’m not going to argue the details.  What I am going to argue is the senselessness of the knee-jerk reactions, i.e. how ridiculously entrenched is the idea that we just can’t have nice things.

The cost of the program was estimated by the government accounting office as $400 B, which puts it in the same ballpark as some stimulus packages.  Virtually without exception that number was taken by the press at full face value.  This was ridiculously, “humongously” expensive.    It was going to undermine free enterprise everywhere, drive inflation, and possibly bankrupt the country.  “We can’t afford things like that.”

There are two problems with that assessment. Let’s start with the $400 B number.  For accounting reasons, it is for a program lifetime total taken over 30 years.  That reduces the average yearly value to $13 B, which is the number to compare against stimulus packages.  Except that number is itself too high.  Again for accounting reasons it assumes that all current debtors will keep paying for the full period—something that has never happened in the past.  Let’s take $10 B as a nice round high estimate, and compare it with another per-year item in the budget—the defense budget just passed.   That number is $858 B. The humungous expense is 1% of that total.  It’s not even big enough to count as a rounding error, and the inflation claim is a joke.

We’re so used to “we can’t afford things like that” that the press can’t do even that much arithmetic.

What’s more (on the free enterprise issue) that money was spent because college had become vastly more expensive precisely during the worst downturn since the Great Depression.  (And the Republican legislature refused to do anything about it—hiding behind the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.)  We like to talk about equality of opportunity.  We, the USA, pioneered high school for all.  In today’s economy college or some other form of post-secondary education has become necessary for good jobs (and bad jobs in this country won’t even get you above the poverty line!).  So we’re not talking about buying televisions on credit—we’re talking about most people’s only chance at a middle class existence.

Biden’s debt forgiveness plan does not fix everything wrong with affordability of education. And it isn’t means-tested (although people who borrow are usually not rich and means tests are almost always counterproductive).  But it is a step forward and addresses a real problem that was not caused (despite the rhetoric) by sheer profligacy.  And the most ardent critics of the incomplete solution are the people committed to doing nothing at all.

Most galling, however, is the universal knee-jerk of “we can’t afford things like that” which can’t be bothered for even a cursory look at what’s real.

Education—Student Loan Debt and the Rest

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The public discussion of Biden’s student loan plan seems to be about some other country—certainly not this one.

Much of the discussion takes the point of view that Biden’s plan is a wildly-expensive and unnecessary change, since post-secondary education is functioning the way it always has.  And further the plan isn’t sufficiently targeted to the poor, so there is no point in doing it.

In fact post-secondary education in this country is so broken you hardly know where to start.  And the people targeted by the plan were so badly screwed by us that we have a responsibility to notice. 

Let’s look at the history.  The following chart is a point of departure:

It’s obvious from the chart that around 2008 something happened to the cost of college—it took off.  A prime ingredient was the George Bush’s 2008 crash, which was a double whammy:  states had less money to spend—so tuition went up—and students and their parents had less money to pay it.  As we all learned during the Covid crisis, states have limited ability to deal with new expenses, as many are prohibited from running deficits.  They need to rely on the federal government to help them out. 

However the Republican Congress blocked all stimulus (remember the “balanced budget amendment”) to provoke dissatisfaction for the 2016 election.  So there was no help to be had.   Unsurprisingly people had to take on new levels of debt.  And with Republicans continuing to sabotage the recovery, there were few jobs for these people when they graduated (or didn’t) and went immediately into arrears.  Student load debt didn’t grow because students were irresponsible, it grew because government was.

Adding to that, Republicans spent years protecting fraudulent private pseudo-educational institutions because of the supposed superiority of the private sector.  At such places you could earn a degree in “culinary arts”, for example, which was considered valueless in any real restaurant.   Essentially all students at those institutions incurred monumental levels of debt and no skills.  The worst of those have now been shut down, but Betsy DeVos did everything she could to defend them.

As a country we screwed a generation of students.  From the numbers on the chart, $10 or $20 thousand seems relevant, but assuredly not profligate. As for inflation, the risk has been exaggerated by false comparison to the stimulus packages.  The cost here is budgeted over decades; its current impact is minimal.

However we should be clear that this is a Band-Aid on a God-awful wound, because for the most part things have only gotten worse.

First of all, averaging over all institutions in the country gets a rather diverse mix of good and bad colleges. That’s appropriate for addressing needs of borrowers.  However If you want to go to a good institution to get yourself a good job, the numbers are basically twice what’s on the chart:  around $20 thousand yearly for a good public institution.   For private colleges, we can be more exact since they act as a cartel:  $80K.   Even applying to these places can cost thousands.  So much for equality of opportunity. 

What’s more the public university system, instead of being strengthened, is under attack.  That’s not just a matter of the well-publicized politization of education, bad as that is.   Public funding in many states has been reduced to the point that public colleges are admitting out-of-state (or out-of-country) students in preference to in-state ones, because they need the extra money.  That has actually become a major contributor to student loan debt!  The financial situation is so dire that colleges are spending more on administrators to raise money than on education itself.

All of that sounds like a hard problem, but as with healthcare, just about every other developed country has found a way to do it.  We need to strengthen the public system with necessarily more of a role for federal funding.  Public education has to be first-rate and affordable—and available to everyone in every state.  We’ve got to banish the preposterous model of education as a severely-limited resource with parents ready to kill to get their children into the right places!  In addition we need to limit the size of loans people need to take and be rational about the payback.  The Australian system, with payback based on ability to pay, is one working option.

It’s worth stating the obvious fact that with the current cost of education, the only way we’re keeping this country going is by importing foreign graduates (and telling them how much we hate their being here!).  We’d have to shut down Silicon Valley otherwise.  We should also be clear that when we talk about national security we’re talking not about aircraft carriers but about our national competence in key technologies.

It is also worth stressing the problem is NOT (despite rumblings from both the left and the right) that we’re sending too many people to college.  Good jobs need sophisticated training.  You can look at the government’s own (or anyone else’s) expectations of the jobs we’re going to need to fill.  Sure there should be more specifically vocational training also, but that’s not the answer to the problem we know we’ve got. Also we’ve learned from the Covid experience that online instruction is no silver bullet to replace teachers.

Finally it’s worth responding to the charge that we’re not sufficiently targeting our payments to the poor.  The fact is that the only route to equality of opportunity is making sure that there is a first-class system available to everyone.  We used to understand that.  We were the first to recognize that secondary education needed to be available to everyone.  Eventually other countries caught on, because there was a big advantage to the country in doing it.

This has been proven so many times it’s ridiculous to have to state it—education is the backbone of the strength of the country.  Despite some rhetoric, there’s nothing either left-wing or right-wing about this. Even Adam Smith knew it—he didn’t futz around wondering how little training poor people could get by with, he wanted universal literacy in the eighteenth century.  If we want to succeed as a nation, we need to succeed at education.

Propagandists for Power

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This note is occasioned by John McWhorter’s piece in the NY Times, basically praising Clarence Thomas as a thinker who has been too easily dismissed.

While I agree with Mr. McWhorter on some subjects, I think he is very wrong on this one.  And his mistake is the same one made by other people about other public figures.

First about Clarence Thomas:

  • He is someone who has received help every step of his career, but who has nonetheless declared himself self-made.  His autobiography is emphatic to the point of absurdity on the subject. 
  • His general philosophy is heavily influenced by that mythology.  Like many other pseudo-self-made people (there are admittedly more rich than poor of them), he asserts “I did it, so can anyone else who has what it takes.”  No one should be asking government for help.  That he sincerely believes this does not make it either true or admirable.
  • Despite his self-delusions, he has not achieved his success as a thinker.  He has achieved success as a propagandist for power.  His ideas, however well or badly thought-out, are irrelevant to his current position.  He is a tool in the Koch organization’s (and Republican party’s) battle plan.  The position being propagated is simple and convenient:  we just don’t have to care.
  • Contrary to what you sometimes read in the papers, he has not driven the Supreme Court to its current position on the extreme right.  That is a Koch-managed and funded enterprise that has put a succession of Federalist Society judges on the Court.

We should now talk more generally.  There were places and times in the past when people seemed at least worried about selling out.  That is, whether they were putting personal advantage above some notion of morality.

We are no longer at that place or time.  In the United States (and elsewhere) today, there is no morality stronger than financial success.  People don’t need to agonize anymore, because riches are proof of morality.  That’s the Clarence Thomas problem, and he is far from the only example.

I’d even put Milton Friedman in that category (along with a good chunk of the Federalist Society).  Milton Friedman was certainly capable of understanding the logical flaw in his argument:  it’s okay to declare that corporations serve their stockholders—but only if someone else is minding the store.  If those same corporations are also running government, then no one is minding the store.  Instead he made himself a wealthy and respected genius, again as a propagandist for power.

No one should be venerating propagandists for power, no matter how sincere such people believe themselves to be.

Down with Monotheism

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Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy.  That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right.  But in fact it is a simple statement of what drives quite a lot of policy, both domestic and international.

Let’s start close to home.   In both Britain and the US there is a big problem with past imperial grandeur.  The Brits just can’t get over their lost empire, and they keep doing completely illogical and crazy things (e.g. Brexit) in hopes of getting it back.  The fact that the world has changed since then, with new powers and new bases for strength doesn’t register.  Since the empire is taken to be an expression of British superiority (and of God’s grace raining down on Britain) there is no reason why it can’t just happen again.  There is only one God and he’s ours.

The US has a similar problem, just a little later in time.  We had the 1950’s and even 60’s when in the years following the destruction of the World War II the US was unquestionably the world’s only remaining superpower.  If anything we were more dominant than the British as their peak.  And we’re just as blind in looking back to it.  Our dominance was a result of national superiority and God’s grace.   We are the chosen rulers of the world and there’s nothing that ought to stop that.

The Chinese and the Russians have similar issues.  Having lived in Italy at one point, there’s more than a bit of it (going back several centuries) there too.

The Old Testament (as I understand it) had a more limited notion of monotheism:  each nation had it’s own god or gods and international struggles were also struggles of those gods.  That sounds a little more accurate.  Contemporary monotheism amounts to assertions of primacy.  An astounding percentage of Americans are ready to talk about God’s protective shield over the US and our God-given role in running the rest of the world.  That gets in the way of any notion international cooperation or any workable national objectives.  With God on your side, reality just doesn’t matter.

The Brits have already driven themselves to at least a short-term future of poverty.  It is relevant to notice—although seldom mentioned—that the pre-EO version of Britain was much slower than the continent in recovering from World War II and generally poorer per capita. 

The US is on the brink of doing the same thing.  We’ve got a dictatorial theocracy going, as well as a “we don’t need anyone” ethos on the right that denies any need to interact with the rest of the world except under terms of dominance.  Furthermore the pervasive xenophobia denies the (currently enormous) contribution of foreigners to the economic strength of the US.

However the biggest problems are not even that.  As climate change and also Covid and the Ukraine crisis show us, we have only one world.  All the national gods are going to have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of this mess.  Enough with national monotheism.